20

In a perfect world everybody would have a say in how their society is run, everybody would have an equal share in the wealth that society produces, no one would be issuing orders and no one bowing a head and obeying. The world ain’t perfect. Understanding human society and understanding that they were no more than very intelligent humans without the inconvenience of hormones, the AIs instantly decided how things should run. While they were capable of dividing authority evenly and knew this could work, they realized themselves not so inclined to evenly divide up responsibility. One should go with the other so they gave Earth Central ultimate authority and responsibility. The buck would therefore always stop at that cubic building in which Earth Central resided on the shores of Lake Geneva.

- Anonymous

The above is a dubious contention at best. How Earth Central came to rule has always been and always will be the subject of much debate among human historians. Some believe EC was elected to the position because it possessed the most processing power at the time; others believe that particular AI started the Quiet War, retaining control throughout and afterwards; still others assert that a group of high-level AIs agreed upon an even division of power, only EC didn’t agree, and now the other AIs are no longer around to tell the tale. I’d rather not say which story I believe.

- From How It Is by Gordon

Cormac gazed at the filtered glare of the nearby sun, nodded to himself, then turned to Mr Crane.

‘Get rid of it now,’ he told the Golem.

Crane tilted his head in acknowledgement, his brass hands pressed down on the Harpy’s console. He made no other move, but Cormac was aware of the sudden surge of information all about him, and gazing through the ship he observed the activity of the Jain-tech at the juncture between the Harpy and the legate vessel. A series of thumps followed, jerking the Harpy sideways, and then, trailing tendrils like a root-bound stone, the legate craft fell away, impelled by the blasts from the small charges Knobbler had placed out there. The larger ship now swung round, and Cormac could see the legate craft now silhouetted against the arc glare of the sun, into which it would eventually fall.

Next, Cormac returned his attention to the third vessel out there - only recently arrived. It gleamed in the close glare of the blue sun, and Cormac recognized it at once as the one Orlandine had used to escape from one of the Dyson segments - a seeming age ago when he had been less wise, and less bitter. He eyed the Heliotrope for a little while, noting the burn scars on its hull, the heat-generated iridescence and the fact that one jaw of its pincer grab was missing and the other warped.

‘Knobbler, your companions have arrived,’ he said out loud, knowing the war drones in that crammed hold-space back there could hear everything clearly here in the cockpit.

‘Oh, have they really?’ Knobbler replied in his head, every word dripping sarcasm. Of course the drones back there knew the Heliotrope had arrived, since they had been in contact with Cutter and Bludgeon for some time.

A sudden shifting and clattering ensued, and he glanced down as a warning lit up on the console: cargo-hold doors.

‘Where will you go now?’ he asked.

‘The border,’ Knobbler replied.

There was only one border the war drone could possibly be referring to: that place called the Graveyard by those who occupied it, that uneasy territory lying between the Polity and the Prador Third Kingdom. It was a place well suited to those he now saw departing the Harpy and heading out towards the Heliotrope. He glanced down at Arach.

‘Do you want to go with them?’ he asked.

The spider drone fixed him with ruby eyes. ‘Don’t you need my help?’

‘I would certainly appreciate it, and I know that the danger is not something that bothers you, but you do understand what I intend to do now?’

‘I understand,’ said Arach. ‘Something has to be done.’

Cormac nodded and looked up straight into the black star-flecked eyes of the brass Golem. He nodded once, and the Harpy’s, steering thrusters fired up, turning it away from the sun, then the fusion drive ignited. The little ship seemed to draw away with ponderous slowness, but Cormac was in no hurry. He no longer served ECS, and as far as any in the Polity knew, he had died during the heroic battle against Erebus.

He recollected that moment, some while after every wormship had fallen to fragments, when he had decided it was time to get in contact with Jerusalem. Perhaps his disposition had grown sunnier on seeing Erebus completely defeated, and such feelings of optimism had grown upon seeing the King of Hearts limping out of the gradually receding zone of U-space disruption.

‘Open a channel to Jerusalem,’ he had instructed.

‘He won’t let me,’ had been Vulture’s reply.

‘He won’t let you?’

Cormac had paused for a moment, confused, then turned and fixed his attention on the big brass Golem. Mr Crane slowly rose to his feet and turned to face him. Cormac realized something was seriously wrong and dropped his hand towards his thin-gun but, knowing that would be ineffective against this opponent, swung his attention instead to his proton carbine, earlier stowed in a webbing container by the rear door. Crane moved, fast. He stepped forward, his big hand stabbing out before Cormac could react and closing about Cormac’s skull. The information packet cut straight through his defences and immediately opened in his gridlink, its contents quickly establishing themselves in his mind as imposed memory.

He remembered Mika speaking.

‘Somebody has to be told, and I could only think of you,’ she said, and he saw the ancient Trafalgar lying at the centre of the bloom of Jain-tech coral; he saw her journey inside and the disappointing results of her encounter with the Jain AIs. He saw the corpse of Fiddler Randal in his chair, assimilated the last moments of that man’s life and processed all the implications of that.

‘We’re outside the accretion disc now,’ she continued. ‘The other Dragon sphere is badly damaged but can be repaired. Dragon says he intends to remain here until, or if, it becomes safe to return. Perhaps you’ll send a ship for me or even come out here yourself. I hope so.’ Cormac hoped so too, but first there was something he needed to do.

When the Harpy was sufficiently distant from the sun, it dropped into underspace. Cormac left the cockpit and went to find the cold-sleep facilities aboard. At least there he wouldn’t dream.

* * * *

Mr Crane removed his coat, folded it neatly and placed it down on the slab of basalt jutting from the foreshore. The Golem then carefully unlaced his boots and removed them too, placing them beside the coat. Last, almost reluctantly, went his hat: reverently placed on top of the folded coat, with a stone on the brim to stop it blowing away. Cormac had to sometimes wonder about the big brass Golem’s priorities. Now Crane hoisted a backpack Cormac knew to contain a heavy and dangerously unstable power supply. This was in turn linked by a superconducting cable to a weapon cobbled together out of six proton carbines. It seemed an appropriately massive and lethal device for its bearer.

Cormac turned his attention from the Golem and gazed up at the sky, trying to remember how many years had passed since he had seen that shade of blue but could not quite recollect when last he was here. Certainly there had not been so much traffic up there then, for now the sky was filled from horizon to horizon with lines of gravcars, monolithic atmosphere ships and other free-floating structures he would have felt more comfortable about had they been down on the ground. Tiredly he lowered his gaze to that gleaming cube of ceramal, over a mile and a half along each side, windowless and planted on the shore of Lake Geneva.

Earth Central.

He contemplated that place for a long moment, briefly skimming his U-sense inside, then turned his attention to the lake and noted that the massive weapons on the bed of it remained somnolent, nor was there any sign of activity from those other things buried in the rock of the mountains hedging in this little cove. Thus far the draconic virus Crane had used against the security systems in this area remained undiscovered, but such a breathing space would not last. So heavily layered was the security for miles around that they could not go unnoticed for long. Now he returned his attention to the big building itself, to locate his target.

He stared hard at the vessel that contained the ruler of the Polity, extending and focusing his U-sense within it. Thousands of humans, haimen and AIs worked in the complexes situated in the outer skin of this huge building, but he peered through them to the core where AI Earth Central itself squatted. The intensity of his focus revealed precisely what he had expected: spaces packed with optics and large data processors, layer upon layer of scanners and detectors, armour and high-powered security drones. The drones and their like were not to guard against an attack from outside, for should such an attack have got past the massive stations of Solar System Defence and the things buried around here, a few drones and lasers would have been no obstacle. The inner defences were a precaution should any of those actually working within take it upon themselves to attack the ruling AI. Cormac knew that a lone human attacker’s lifespan in that environment would be measured in seconds only, which was why he needed help.

He assessed everything he was seeing, tracked energy feeds from armoured drones back to various reactors, built a schematic in his gridlink with all the danger points highlighted and then assigned them. He estimated timings down to fractions of a second, knew that from the point of penetration they would have just three minutes to reach the core, then ten minutes more before remaining security reconfigured and closed on them.

‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

‘As always, boss,’ said Arach, opening up the hatches on his abdomen.

Cormac had wondered where the spider drone’s brain was located, for there seemed no room for one there amid the power supplies and ammunition caches. He glanced over at Crane, who was holding one hand over his bald skull as if embarrassed by its nakedness. Seeing inside the Golem was both worrying and bewildering, for he was densely packed with technology much like Jain-tech, and some areas in there were even blurry to Cormac’s U-sense. As if sensing this scrutiny, Crane quickly lowered his hand then nodded.

On the shore Cormac heaved himself to his feet and trudged across the stones. To his two companions he transmitted the building schematic and the plan of attack before onlining perceptual programs in his gridlink to slow down his perception of time. He sent a signal to his envirosuit, which was of the combat variety, and it injected straight into his bloodstream a cocktail of battlefield stimulants, fast-acting sugars and potassium nerve-accelerants. Now his physical speed could keep up with his perceptual speed, which should enable him to survive for just long enough.

Crane stepped forward and loomed over him. Arach moved in close and rose up onto his hind legs. Cormac reached out and gripped a brass biceps and a chromed spider forelimb, then turned his two companion through U-space, out over Lake Geneva, through layers of ceramal armour and thousands of work stations - straight to the heart of Earth Central.

The place was one of four vast halls that starred off from the building’s core, their curved ceilings all but concealed by fibre optics and armoured S-con cables. All around was gloom-crammed technology. As his feet hit the ceramal floor, Cormac upped the light amplification of his eyes, then fell forward into a roll, simultaneously setting loose Shuriken. Crane meanwhile was stooping, his fuck-you gun angled down towards the floor; Arach squatting then leaping. The spider drone landed on one curved wall tangled with cooling pipes at the same moment as Crane opened fire, molten metal spraying all about him, the six-fold beam of field-accelerated protons punching down through power lines to hit the casing of a reactor, which shut down immediately once breached. From the ceiling, behind and ahead, armoured saucer drones folded down on jointed arms, trailing power cables. Arach’s Gatling cannons were now facing in opposite directions and thundering red fire along the hall to smash the drones before they could access new power supplies. One drone, hanging broken, still turned nevertheless. Cormac flung himself aside as a stream of rail-gun missiles folded up the floor and sharp metal sprayed everywhere. Shuriken screamed overhead, slammed through the drone’s mounting, and it fell, incinerated in mid-air by Crane.

‘Sorry, boss,’ said Arach, now scuttling ahead of him along the ceiling through smoking cables and heat-distorted metal.

Second blast from Crane, up at an angle through the ceiling, another reactor closed down, power lines shorting out like huge welding rods in the structure above. Cormac was then up and running onto a grated floor with pieces of metal spraying up around him. Rail-gun fire from below. Drones fast repositioned. Crane firing again, then again. Smoke belching from ventilation ducts, and something clattering along behind the right-hand wall.

‘Golem!’ Cormac shouted, though these weren’t unexpected.

The first was a silvery blur shooting up behind Crane. Without looking round the big brass man chopped out with one hand and the skeletal Golem folded over it with a clang. He turned, slammed it into the wall, stepped back and fired, the thing flicking about in proton fire until it came apart. Skeletal fingers came up through a grating ahead of Cormac. He stepped carefully aside then shielded his face as that area of floor disappeared. Leaping the burning cavity Arach had excavated, he glanced down to see more skeletals crawling up through quadrate internal structure, then Crane was right behind him, firing down. The big brass Golem leaped after him, landing with a crash, burned through the wall to the left, to the right, then up at one o’clock. That should have shut down all the reactors here. Firing came from ahead as Arach entered the core area, then from behind as Crane turned. Cormac slowed to a walk, gazed through Shuriken’s sensors as the throwing star slammed into the chest of the skeletal on the other side of the adjacent wall. He held out his hand as he stepped into the core area, whereupon Shuriken rounded a partition, folded in its smoking blades and settled on his palm. He retained the device for in a moment he would need it again.

‘I got him covered,’ said Arach.

The core was claustrophobic, a chamber with a peaked dome, fibre optics and S-con power cables coming in through ducts all the way round to terminate at a ring of five cylindrical pillars. On these, at waist height, were five lozenges of crystal braced with black metal and clamped into place from above by things that looked like ancient engine valves. Each of these crystals could contain a runcible AI apiece, or perhaps the mind of a big ship like the Jerusalem, but they were merely sub-minds of the thing lying in the very centre of the circle. From the five pillars optic feeds ran along the floor into a central pyramid with its tip chopped away. Sitting on the uppermost flat surface was a grey sphere the size of a tennis ball, its exterior irregular and its substance slightly translucent. Clamping it in place from above was a column of bluish crystal, mushrooming out where it connected at the lower end.

Ten minutes.

That was Cormac’s estimate of the time they had left before the outer Golem caches opened up and those skeletal killers came swarming into this place; ten minutes also before internals could reconfigure to bring new drones to bear. Really, the security here was not that great, but then no one had ever expected heavily armed intruders to be able to transport themselves this deep inside.

Cormac moved forward past the sub-minds and gazed intently at the grey sphere. Earth Central, oddly, was old. Quantum processors were no longer made so small, since greater stability and ruggedness resulted from using a wider lattice crystal, like that found in modern runcible complexes, ships, drones and Golem.

‘So, rumours of your demise were exaggerated?’ enquired a voice he recognized of old.

Cormac was not prepared to banter, especially with something that had so deliberately spoken with the voice of his now dead mentor and superior Horace Blegg.

‘You allowed Erebus to attack the Polity,’ he stated.

‘I allowed nothing. I merely limited the extent of my response.’

Something flickered in the air between Cormac and that grey sphere. He didn’t react as he knew this was no weapon - merely a hologram projected from fibre heads in the floor.

‘Millions have died because you limited the extent of your response.’

A line of light cut down and out of it folded Horace Blegg. ‘But is that a crime?’ he asked.

‘For evil to prosper, all that is required is for good men to do nothing,’ said Cormac, for it was something Blegg had once quoted to him. ‘Are you Blegg, or are you just Earth Central’s mouthpiece.’

The old oriental shrugged. ‘We know that I am both.’

‘Why allow this attack?’ Cormac asked.

Blegg shook his head. ‘I made you well, Cormac. You would have been a perfect replacement for the one whose image you see before you.’

Though Cormac did not want to be distracted, he was.

‘Explain that.’

‘Well, do you consider your ability to transport yourself through U-space an evolved one? It is not. I chose you long ago when I first began taking apart Jain technology and built the replicating biomechanisms you first saw as this form I’m in, as Horace Blegg.’

Cormac waited.

Earth Central continued: ‘Through a series of Horace Bleggs I developed the technology, only incorporating U-space hardware when I finally chose my subject. Do you remember the Hubris, Cormac?’

He did; it had taken him to Samarkand, a world thrown into cold by Dragon’s destruction of the runcible buffers there. ‘I remember that ship.’

‘Not the ship, Cormac, the AI,’ the image before him corrected. ‘Hubris installed the technology in you during that journey to Samarkand, while you were in cold sleep, and it has slowly grown in your bones ever since. It took some time, for the complexity is great, but I knew it was working once you started gridlinking bare-brained.’

‘I am to believe that?’

‘How else do you explain yourself?’

It was a distraction. His time here was limited and it was passing quickly.

‘Why did you allow this attack?’ he repeated.

‘Ever since the war with the Prador, humanity’s pace of development has slowed almost to the point of stagnation. Development only accelerates under threat, and we know that complacency kills.’

‘Trite.’

‘It is a dangerous universe, Cormac, one in which a decadent and lazy human race could at any time face extinction.’

‘Millions died,’ Cormac repeated.

‘But I did not kill them; I merely did not save them.’

‘That’s a very fine line.’

‘Are you here to destroy me, Cormac?’ the hologram enquired. ‘Very few will notice any difference, for the moment I cease to function, one of my sub-minds will take up the reins. It will take only a matter of microseconds for it to assume my duties.’

‘But it won’t be you.’

‘Another fine line.’

Cormac bowed his head for a moment. ‘Perhaps I can accept that doing less than you are able to do is no crime.’ He raised his head. ‘She said she would not be allowed to live “while the betrayer still sits on his throne”, and of course then I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Now I do. You crossed the line when you sent your own people to the Trafalgar, so that ship’s AI could use them to initiate Jain nodes. In that you are culpable of murder. I’m here for the sake of Fiddler Randal and Henrietta Ipatus Chang, and others whose names only you know.’

‘Ah, that,’ said Earth Central. ‘So you are a moral creature, Cormac?’

Cormac stepped forward through the hologram and flung Shuriken. The throwing star shot from his hand, extending its blades only a little way, then whirred up to a scream. It hit the pillar above the Earth Central AI, and the pillar shattered, a rain of blue glass clattering down and spilling through the gratings underfoot.

Cormac swept up the ruler of the Polity in one hand.

* * * *

Something was rising up from the depths of Lake Geneva, and weapons turrets had already risen like giant steel fists from the hedging mountains. It didn’t matter. Cormac knew he could pull his companions out in an instant now, back up to that old orbital museum against which the Harpy was docked and hidden by its own chameleonware. That same place where Cormac had paused for a while to walk and gaze upon the exhibits - artefacts from the true beginning of the space age. He recollected how the curator there, a human without augmentation, had taken an interest in him and asked where he was from.

Back from the wars, Cormac had replied, to which the response had been, What wars?

Ever was it thus.

After watching Mr Crane pull on his boots again, don his coat, place his hat upon his head and carefully adjust it, Cormac peered down at the grey orb he himself held. He gazed into it, but its structure revealed no more than would the regular formation inside some rock. However, by concentrating his U-sense on the hand that held it, it revealed thin dense fibres in its bones. Earth Central had not been lying about that.

With annoying predictability, Arach asked, ‘What now, boss?’

What now indeed.

‘I’m heading out to the accretion disc to find Mika,’ Cormac replied. ‘If you and Mr Crane here,’ he nodded to the brass Golem, ‘were to come with me, that would be more convenient, since then I wouldn’t have to find another ship.’ He shrugged. ‘Or you can go your own way. I would say that things are going to be a bit hot for all three of us in the Polity right now.’

‘But I meant,’ said Arach, ‘what now?’ The spider drone reached up tentatively and tapped one sharp foot against the grey orb.

Cormac weighed the thing for a moment.

‘Here, you take this,’ he said, then tossed it to Mr Crane, who snatched it from the air snake-fast.

The brass Golem held the orb for half a second, before saying, ‘He must pay,’ then crushed Earth Central to fragments, and scattered crystal glitter about his lace-up boots.

Cormac guessed Crane must be choosy about what he included in his collection of toys. He gazed down at the glitter for a moment, then up at the sky, trying to fix that blue in his mind. ‘Time to go,’ he said.

* * * *

Another one of those ridiculous myths that seems to have become a stand-in for religion and a sop for humans ashamed to be not only less able than their creations but ruled by them is the avenging angel, the modern-day Nemesis. Sometimes this character is accompanied by Mr Crane, by a steel spider, by a woman with mysterious powers, or by any combination of each and all of them. Inevitably he and his companions are associated with that all-too-real alien entity, Dragon. This godling, this Nemesis, has great powers, for he can get to any AI, anywhere, and then kill it. He is there to keep our masters in line. Sometimes he is referred to as Ian Cormac, or Agent Cormac (associations there with those dangerous heroes of ECS). It is complete wishful thinking, of course, and all too ridiculous to be true . . .

- Anonymous

Orlandine woke immediately, but her perception was sluggish, crippled because a vast proportion of her resources was simply unavailable. The photovoltaic cells on the surface of her interface sphere were supplying just enough energy for her to wake and to power up the passive sensors dotted about the same surface. Her body temperature sat a spit or two above absolute zero, and though the cryonic technique she had used as she froze would have prevented the formation of damaging ice crystals, she knew there would still be a lot of repairs to make. She also needed much more power than was presently available to be able to think at more than a mere human level, and to see her surroundings with more than the present limited proportion of the electromagnetic spectrum available to her.

Belatedly, she checked the time, wondering if the universe was filled with dead suns and red giants, and whether her present wakefulness was due to her briefly warming herself on its cooling embers. But a mere two hundred years had passed.

Orlandine was astonished, then fatalistic. Unless she had somehow beaten the huge odds stacked against her, there was only one reason for her to be awake now: someone had come looking for her. She wondered why. Surely the Polity AIs would not bother waking her from certain death merely to execute sentence upon her? Or perhaps they were waking her so they could study her? She concentrated her severely hampered faculties on available sensor data.

The stars here were sparsely scattered, vague dots without sufficient light output to power up her interface sphere. However, she was being supplied light. Unfortunately it was lased, focused upon her sphere, and all but blinded her to its source.

Energy levels gradually increased and she managed to gain another percentage point of processing power. No, not Polity AIs, for in two hundred years they would have utterly understood and conquered Jain technology or been annihilated by it, so in either case would have no need to study her. Few others possessed the resources to find her, though it was possible that had changed in the intervening centuries. Running projections, calculations and her limited suite of programs, she could not find the answer, so did something utterly human: she took a wild guess.

‘Hello, Dragon,’ she sent.

‘Well, that’s a confirmation,’ came the immediate reply.

The laser now divided into numerous beams, each focusing precisely on individual collections of photovoltaic cells, allowing her to see the massive alien hanging out there in void.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘Always a difficult question, that,’ Dragon replied. ‘What do you want, Orlandine? Think carefully before you answer now.’

Orlandine did not bother trying to calculate what might be the correct reply, what would be the best answer to ensure her survival in this situation. Even with her full processing power she probably could not have worked it out, for Dragon was as opaque as steel and even major Polity AIs struggled to divine the reasoning behind its words. She decided to just be truthful.

‘Well obviously I want to survive,’ she said.

‘That is plainly evident,’ Dragon replied. ‘But what do you want?’

Orlandine thought long and hard about that. What had driven her to hang on to a Jain node, to go as far as killing her lover to conceal that she possessed it? What had been her life’s aim before Erebus had killed her twin brothers?

‘I want to build something numinous.’

The intensity of the lasers abruptly increased, upping the power the voltaics were supplying her. Her processing capacity jumped up another five per cent. Obviously she had given a correct answer, though was it correct enough?

‘It is a long slow struggle to overcome the inertia of the Polity, of its humans and even its AIs,’ Dragon informed her, ‘without the kind of impetus Earth Central supplied by giving Erebus the means to control Jain technology and allowing it to attack - an attack you stopped in its tracks.’

‘Yes,’ said Orlandine. ‘Development being proportional to death toll has been a benchmark throughout human history.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Dragon agreed, continuing, ‘you of course understand that Fiddler Randal ensured Erebus would never attack again, but you are certainly unaware that Earth Central would never allow such an attack again.’

‘Why?’

‘The AI that controls the Polity is still called Earth Central, but it is not the same AI - it is a replacement with an understanding that such callous actions will result in it being destroyed just like its predecessor.’

‘Destroyed?’

‘Agent Ian Cormac learned of its perfidy . . .’

It took Orlandine only a moment to grasp that thread. Of course, with his decidedly unusual abilities, Cormac could be the ultimate assassin - barring USER disruption there was no defence he could not step around, and no human or AI he could not get to.

‘This is very interesting,’ she said, ‘but hardly explains why you came after me.’

‘Over the last two hundred years there have been great dangers, near-extinction events and many like the biophysicist Skellor. Quarantine and selective sterilization of many areas within the Polity has destroyed all the Jain technology there, however, Jain-tech remains a severe threat, one that the Polity, especially since it is as undeveloped as when you departed it, is not truly equipped to deal with. While the accretion disc swarms with Jain technology, even though it is now an interdict area and surrounded by massive defences and watch stations, the evil keeps escaping its box.’

Orlandine contemplated her incorrect prediction of the now. Of course, though AIs might perfectly understand Jain technology, that did not necessarily mean they were safe from it. Many AIs and humans perfectly understood the working of guns and bombs, but that had not stopped people dying as a result of their use.

‘The Polity will go the same way as the other races,’ she said. ‘Some future race might find just a few ruins.’

‘Just so, especially when the accretion disc’s sun fully ignites and blows a sandstorm of Jain nodes across the Polity.’

‘What do you want me to build?’ she asked.

‘You say that you want to build, Orlandine, but two hundred years ago you demonstrated a greater facility for destruction.’

‘I see.’

‘You are,’ said Dragon, ‘going to spend the rest of your existence annihilating a technology, tearing it up by its roots and utterly erasing it. In effect, the numinous thing you will build will be the future of the Polity. Do you agree?’

‘Did you think for one moment that I wouldn’t?’

The light grew brighter.